I’m going to make a change to the Pandante stretch goals that benefits all our backers.

Pandante is such a great game that I want to put out the best version I possibly can components-wise, no matter what funding level we reach. Even if we only raise a portion of what’s needed to fully fund this print run, I’m willing to pay for the component upgrades that I think Pandante and Flash Duel should have. I’m hoping that eventually positive word of mouth about the games will make that a worthwhile choice.

Golden Panda Coin. This coin is so hype! When you feel it in your hands, it has a coolness factor that makes you want to win it in the game. I didn’t know what the quality of the coin would be when we first started out, but now that I have physical samples and I can see how great it is, we just have to have it even if it costs me a lot.

Also, it's huge. One player thought it should be called a gold medal, rather than a coin!

Pandante deluxe will have the 2” metal coin, no stretch goal for it, you just get it.

The $25 Pandante expansion will also have the same metal coin.

There’s also Flash Duel. I’m pretty happy about the adjustments to the core system we’ve done. Removing the last-hits mechanic makes it simpler to explain and more focused on the back and forth part of the game that you’d hope was the emphasis anyway. Balance is in a better state now too. I want to follow that up with another component upgrade:

Flash Duel will contain 21 character standups, rather than pawns. No stretch goal, you just get it.

And there’s more. I want to thank all our kickstarter backers, I’m so grateful for their support. So I want to include the 3 extra Pandante casino cards for all kickstarter backers (not part of the retail products) at all levels. That means if you get the deluxe version, standard version, or the expansion, you’ll get these 3 extra casino cards. The extra cards are a bit crazier than the rest of the casinos, so I bet you’ll enjoy that.

Your Help

Would you like to help spread the joy of Pandante? I know a lot of you have the print-and-play version—hundreds of people downloaded it for free last weekend—so if you happen to play it, post your thoughts somewhere before the campaign ends. It could be on Boardgamegeek, or anywhere else. Let us know if you do!

Also, can you tweet some funny images (or clever text) about Pandas to #LyingPandas or #Pandante? I actually don’t know if that would help at all, but it would be fun and I was looking forward to laughing at some of them. ;)

Summary

Here’s the bottom line summary:

Pandante deluxe will have the 2” metal Panda Coin

Pandante expansion will have it too

Flash Duel will have 21 character standups rather than pawns

All pledge levels (of $25 or more) get the 3 extra Pandante casino cards, for backers only (not part of the retail product later)

You post your thoughts on the game somewhere, or tweet to #LyingPandas or #Pandante

Pandante has a fun new feature called "casino cards" which I covered before, here. Casino cards let you visit a new casino in the Pandalands each gambit, each changing the rules in some way.

Here's three of them:

Bunny Hop Hotel. At this casino, you hop right to the action. There's only one betting phase, rather than three. You see all the community cards, bet, do abilities, then showdown. It's a nice change of pace in that it's so fast!

Hard Times Mill. It really feels like hard times at the Hard Times Mill. At other casinos, it's common to see bets on hands as high as rainbow straight or four of a kind. Yet here, it's exciting if someone bets even three of a kind. Pandas come over and watch if they even hear about a hand like that. A full house is some kind of epic, crazy thing here. Gameplay-wise, this lets you explore the lower ranked hands a lot more. Flavor-wise, being so starved to make a decent hand makes you appreciate how good you have it at other casinos.

Quince's Palace. Quince is the Chief Magistrate of Flagstone, known for his magnanimous straight talking. (Note: he actually relies on lies and deception to the point that you can't even tell what is real and what is not. In Yomi, he can play two combat cards, one of which is an illusion.) At Quince's Palace, there are TWO rows of community cards (are they both real?). There are so many possibilities for hands here that it's kind of mind-bending at times. Sometimes you can't even tell what your opponents are going for, which captures essence of Quince really well.

These casino cards and more are are included in the new Pandante 2nd Edition standard and deluxe sets. They are also in the expansion, for those who already have chips and a Pandante deck.Check it out on kickstarter now.

Codex is an upcoming customizable (not collectable) card game that does things very differently from the rest of the genre. It's themed after RTS video games such as Starcraft and Warcraft 3. You command heroes who each have their own spells and you build tech buildings that produce units. You carry a lot of versatility into each game because the cards in your codex are analogous to all the things a given race could build in an RTS. You choose which subset you want in your current game by building your deck as the game progresses. Players don't know exactly what other players are building toward, so there's a natural form of fog of war involved.

Here's the game's logo:

Although Codex has been in development on and off for over 10 years, it's not quite finished yet. You can get a sneak peak at some of the art though because there's a limited edition alternate art version of Pandante's deck on kickstarter right now. It lets you play Pandante with a Codex-themed deck!

Here's what normal Pandante cards look like:

And here's the Codex-themed version:

Also, here's the Joker from each deck:

This special deck is for two of the higher pledge tiers on the Pandante kickstarter (you get Pandante deluxe with or without professional-grade play poker chips, the new revised printing of Flash Duel, and this special Codex-themed Pandante deck). By pledging for this collector's item, you're also supporting the development of Codex and helping us reach stretch goals for Pandante and Flash Duel, too. Here's where you can pledge.

Stay tuned for another preview of this deck showing the Panda Champions / Codex Heroes.

Winning by lying is the highest honor in Pandante (on kickstarter now). When you do that in poker, it’s usually best to keep your bluff secret, but in Pandante we want to showcase that exciting moment. We want you to show everyone that you got away with it and gloat about it.

In the original version of Pandante, winning by lying gave you one of six Panda Lord cards that are powerups for the next gambit (the next hand). In this new version of Pandante, I wanted to make it even simpler: rather than picking through 6 cards with a bunch of words on them, you should win one satisfying, iconic thing. (The Panda Lords are now things you can start the game with, giving each player a special power if you want to do that.)

What satisfying, iconic thing should you get for winning by lying? What should it do and what should it look like? My first idea was that it should be a big, shiny metal Panda Coin that you can spend to draw 5 cards and discard 5 cards. That’s very powerful, but you deserve it. Also, you’ll have to use it or lose it because if someone else wins by lying while you have the coin, they’ll steal it from you.

Playtesting showed that this worked just fine. People liked it, and liked that they immediately understood the reward for winning by lying. So then started the long task of actually making a metal coin. I wanted it to be simple to match the graphic design style of the rest of Pandante, so the first thing that came to mind was a Panda on one side and the bamboo logo with the game name and company name on the back.

I wanted something similar to the Panda on the box’s front cover. Here was the first mockup:

But it should really show the Panda holding 5 cards rather than 6, given what the coin does. Also, it needs to be graphically simplified a little to work well as a metal carving. Here was the first version of that:

One way to make a metal coin is to have exactly two heights on the face. To do that, think of the graphics as pure black and white (with no other shades) and the black areas are raised and the white areas are recessed.

You can make a nicer looking coin if you do it another way though. Rather than each “pixel” of coin being on or off, you can carve a 3D shape into it. Vertical curves that let you round the edge of a face and show more nuance. To accomplish this, I did my own “artist’s rendering” of what the metal coin should look like with various curves and different heights:

That looks pretty good, but I cheated here. The dark background behind the panda and behind the logo isn’t what a real coin will look like. A metal coin is made of just one kind of material, so it can’t have such different colors. I want there to be as much contrast as possible though, so what can we do?

We can use different textures. By making the background a rough texture and the figure a smooth texture, when light bounces off the coin it will be easier to separate the figure from the background. Here’s my artist’s rendering of that:

Looking really good now! The next step is to turn this into a 3D model that the coin manufacturers can use:

Then the final step is a physical prototype. Here it is:

This coin is huge: 2 inches in diameter! It has to be to fit in Panda paws though.Here’s a video of it moving so you can see the contours in the light:

This awesome coin will be included in the new Pandante Deluxe on kickstarter if we unlock that stretch goal. It will also be in the $25 expansion if we reach that goal. Pledge now and let’s do it! (kickstarter link.)

We discuss the development of Pandante's expansion and 2nd edition. All three of us were involved in this development and playtesting. The core game has simplified and streamlined rules and we go through each one and explain why we made these changes. We also cover all the new (optional) content and what it adds to the game.

The new Pandante has a great feature called "casino cards." Each gambit (each time you start a new hand), you visit a new casino in the Pandalands which has slightly different rules.

Here's three of them:

Jokers Wild Resort. This is probably the most beloved casino amongst everyone I've played with, even though it's so simple. Before the gambit starts, you find the Joker in the deck, then make sure it's one of the initial three community cards (the "Splash"). There's a fun factor in all the versatility in making hands the Joker brings. It counts as any color and any number.

Bountiful Bamboo Tavern. This casino lets everyone draw a card, then discard a card after the normal snack phase during the Splash, and then again after the snack phase during the Paws. Everyone is a bit more likely to make a difficult hand here.

Triple Play Parlor. Players normally get to do up to 2 abilities, but here you can do 3. There's a lot of different things that happen because of this. Some players go for an even more difficult hand than usual and then use their extra ability to draw a card to try to hit that hand. The Raise ability is really powerful in Pandante though. One of the reasons you don't raise all the time is you're just so constrained by having only 2 abilities. So with 3, you're more able to fit a Raise in. The same goes with Peek. It's always great to look at a card from another player's hand, and you're more likely to be able to fit that into your plan at the Triple Play Parlor.

All three of these casinos are very simple. It's good to keep things simple so that even non-gamers can understand what's going on. I want to show you one of the more complex casinos too though.

There are usually 6 abilities to choose from during the ability phase and you can do up to two of them, including the same one twice if you want. At the Oracle's Dreamery, there's 2 new abilities, so you have 8 to choose from in total.

Rearrange is a tricky ability. If you do Rearrange, then Draw, that lets you get the best of 3 cards when a simple Draw, Draw would have only let you see 2 cards. Rearrange then Add acts similarly. You'll choose which of 3 cards you want to add to the community cards, rather than only getting 2 options with Add, then Add. Furthermore, Rearrange then Add or Draw is better Draw+Draw and Add+Add for another reason: you get to see all three cards before you make your decision of which one you want. The normal way to do things means you have to decide each action as you go.

You also end up knowing the top TWO cards of the deck. Will the next player even bother to Draw or Add, when you already know what card is there and had some say about which card it is? If they Draw, you'll know what's in their hand! Being the Oracle really gives you an information advantage here! It's likely that other players will have to Rearrange before Drawing or Adding just so they can dig deep enough in the deck to actually get to a new card.

Tie-break is another interesting ability. It's fairly common to have players tied for the highest claimed hand in Pandante. For example, two players each claim they have a rainbow straight. When you really have the hand you claim, it's sometimes pretty hard to get a better hand than that by using Draw or Add. But if you use Tie-break, you don't need a better hand. You'll automatically win against anyone with the same hand who didn't use it. Also, if you really do have your hand, this gives you a big advantage against people who don't have it but who are trying to draw into it. They'll need to spend their ability slots on improving their hand, but you can use your abilities on powering up your Tie-break so that you win anyway, even if they do match your hand!

There's a lot going on in the Oracle's Dreamery. The abilities it offers are optional though, which makes it nice for new players who want to see how other Pandas use Rearrange and Tie-break.

Pandante is on kickstarter right now. If you already have the game, you can get casino cards and lots of other new things in the expansion. If you don't have it yet, all this new stuff is built right into the new base sets. Check it out now.

The Light & Dark expansion for Pandante is unusual in a few ways. Usually expansions make a game more complicated. This one actually makes Pandante simpler, easier to explain, and faster to play. The core rules have been streamlined, many exceptions have been removed, and the flow of play has fewer steps so you can get through a gambit faster.

The Pandante: Light & Dark expansion also adds lots of new content. Here's the four types of new content:

Use the Light abilities (fun!) or an all-new set of Dark (miserable!) abilities

Casino cards that change a rule about the game each gambit

Panda Champions that give each player a special power

Diamond Dreams mode that makes the blue chips into powerups rather than just money

And here's the punchline: you can mix and match that content however you want. Dark abilities with Casino cards? Yes. Panda Champions in Diamond Dreams mode? Yes. All of it at once? Yes, if you want that level of insanity. It's up to you, and you can start with streamlined core game that's simpler than ever.

If you have never played Pandante before, the new base sets INCLUDE the expansion content built right in. The standard version now comes with plastic chips, and the deluxe version is nicer than ever. If you already have a Pandante deck and chips, you can just get the expansion. All three versions (standard, deluxe, and expansion) now come with a large centralized betting board rather than separate boards for each player. This makes it much easier to tell who has the highest claimed hand at any given time, which is important for computing the cost of "snacks".

Another one of my games, Flash Duel, has been out of print for many months. This kickstarter also offers a reprint of that game, and it's better than ever too. There have been two core rule changes that both simplify and streamline the game, while also putting more emphasis on bluffing and improv, rather than on mathy calculations to create 100% guaranteed checkmate situations at the end of a round.

Now, all game modes use a 40 card deck (rather than 25 in 1v1 before) and you remove a random 5 cards before playing. So rounds last slightly longer (they ended uncomfortably early before) and you can't be entirely sure how many of a certain card are present each round. Also, the "last hits" mechanic is removed. It was the most complicated part of the game, and actually ended up having the opposite as its intended effect anyway. In addition to all this, there are dozens of balance and wording changes, including all text being written in a gender-neutral way now.

This is a great time to jump into both of these new games if you haven't tried them before. They're both better than ever, and it's been a blast developing them and playing all the new content. It's your turn now! Head on over to the kickstarter.

The Menelker & Persephone decks are now available, both the physical and print-and-play version. You can get them here.

Menelker and Persephone are both very powerful-feeling characters, which is consistent with their lore. Menelker can force the opponent to discard, like no one else. He can destroy cards in the opponent’s discard pile too, which no one else can do. He has truly embraced whatever “taboo tactics” he needs to in order to win. His AAAA super is also one of the best in the game.

Persephone’s dominant personality shines through in her gameplay as well. She can keep opponents on their knees with repeated knockdowns while she draws more and more cards. She can somewhat control which cards opponents draw, and she can outright control their combat choices too with Mistress’s Command. Even though she’s fair and balanced in the end, her wins feel like a fantasy when they are happening because she can be so domineering when she gets going.

You can also play these characters in the web version at www.fantasystrike.com and the iOS version too, which is now on both iPad and iPhone. The physical versions ship worldwide from www.sirlingames.com.